Most of the top performing action recognition methods use optical flow as a "black box" input. Here we take a deeper look at the combination of flow and action recognition, and investigate why optical flow is helpful, what makes a flow method good for action recognition, and how we can make it better. In particular, we investigate the impact of different flow algorithms and input transformations to better understand how these affect a state-of-the-art action recognition method. Furthermore, we fine tune two neural-network flow methods end-to-end on the most widely used action recognition dataset (UCF101). Based on these experiments, we make the following five observations: 1) optical flow is useful for action recognition because it is invariant to appearance, 2) optical flow methods are optimized to minimize end-point-error (EPE), but the EPE of current methods is not well correlated with action recognition performance, 3) for the flow methods tested, accuracy at boundaries and at small displacements is most correlated with action recognition performance, 4) training optical flow to minimize classification error instead of minimizing EPE improves recognition performance, and 5) optical flow learned for the task of action recognition differs from traditional optical flow especially inside the human body and at the boundary of the body. These observations may encourage optical flow researchers to look beyond EPE as a goal and guide action recognition researchers to seek better motion cues, leading to a tighter integration of the optical flow and action recognition communities.

In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2018, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a visual odometry (VO) algorithm for a multi-camera system and robust operation in challenging environments. Our algorithm consists of a pose tracker and a local mapper. The tracker estimates the current pose by minimizing photometric errors between the most recent keyframe and the current frame. The mapper initializes the depths of all sampled feature points using plane-sweeping stereo. To reduce pose drift, a sliding window optimizer is used to refine poses and structure jointly. Our formulation is flexible enough to support an arbitrary number of stereo cameras. We evaluate our algorithm thoroughly on five datasets. The datasets were captured in different conditions: daytime, night-time with near-infrared (NIR) illumination and night-time without NIR illumination. Experimental results show that a multi-camera setup makes the VO more robust to challenging environments, especially night-time conditions, in which a single stereo configuration fails easily due to the lack of features.

We present a novel semantic 3D reconstruction framework which embeds variational regularization into a neural network. Our network performs a fixed number of unrolled multi-scale optimization iterations with shared interaction weights. In contrast to existing variational methods for semantic 3D reconstruction, our model is end-to-end trainable and captures more complex dependencies between the semantic labels and the 3D geometry. Compared to previous learning-based approaches to 3D reconstruction, we integrate powerful long-range dependencies using variational coarse-to-fine optimization. As a result, our network architecture requires only a moderate number of parameters while keeping a high level of expressiveness which enables learning from very little data. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our network achieves higher accuracy compared to a purely variational approach while at the same time requiring two orders of magnitude less iterations to converge. Moreover, our approach handles ten times more semantic class labels using the same computational resources.

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), September 2018 (conference)

Abstract

Omnidirectional cameras offer great benefits over classical cameras wherever a wide field of view is essential, such as in virtual reality applications or in autonomous robots. Unfortunately, standard convolutional neural networks are not well suited for this scenario as the natural projection surface is a sphere which cannot be unwrapped to a plane without introducing significant distortions, particularly in the polar regions. In this work, we present SphereNet, a novel deep learning framework which encodes invariance against such distortions explicitly into convolutional neural networks. Towards this goal, SphereNet adapts the sampling locations of the convolutional filters, effectively reversing distortions, and wraps the filters around the sphere. By building on regular convolutions, SphereNet enables the transfer of existing perspective convolutional neural network models to the omnidirectional case. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the tasks of image classification and object detection, exploiting two newly created semi-synthetic and real-world omnidirectional datasets.

In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2018, IEEE, International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

We present a stereo-based dense mapping algorithm for large-scale dynamic urban environments. In contrast to other existing methods, we simultaneously reconstruct the static background, the moving objects, and the potentially moving but currently stationary objects separately, which is desirable for high-level mobile robotic tasks such as path planning in crowded environments. We use both instance-aware semantic segmentation and sparse scene flow to classify objects as either background, moving, or potentially moving, thereby ensuring that the system is able to model objects with the potential to transition from static to dynamic, such as parked cars. Given camera poses estimated from visual odometry, both the background and the (potentially) moving objects are reconstructed separately by fusing the depth maps computed from the stereo input. In addition to visual odometry, sparse scene flow is also used to estimate the 3D motions of the detected moving objects, in order to reconstruct them accurately. A map pruning technique is further developed to improve reconstruction accuracy and reduce memory consumption, leading to increased scalability. We evaluate our system thoroughly on the well-known KITTI dataset. Our system is capable of running on a PC at approximately 2.5Hz, with the primary bottleneck being the instance-aware semantic segmentation, which is a limitation we hope to address in future work.

We address the problem of 3D shape completion from sparse and noisy point clouds, a fundamental problem in computer vision and robotics. Recent approaches are either data-driven or learning-based: Data-driven approaches rely on a shape model whose parameters are optimized to fit the observations; Learning-based approaches, in contrast, avoid the expensive optimization step by learning to directly predict complete shapes from incomplete observations in a fully-supervised setting. However, full supervision is often not available in practice. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised learning-based approach to 3D shape completion which neither requires slow optimization nor direct supervision. While we also learn a shape prior on synthetic data, we amortize, i.e., learn, maximum likelihood fitting using deep neural networks resulting in efficient shape completion without sacrificing accuracy. On synthetic benchmarks based on ShapeNet and ModelNet as well as on real robotics data from KITTI and Kinect, we demonstrate that the proposed amortized maximum likelihood approach is able to compete with fully supervised baselines and outperforms data-driven approaches, while requiring less supervision and being significantly faster.

In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing a dense 3D model using images captured from different views. Recent methods based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) allow learning the entire task from data. However, they do not incorporate the physics of image formation such as perspective geometry and occlusion. Instead, classical approaches based on Markov Random Fields (MRF) with ray-potentials explicitly model these physical processes, but they cannot cope with large surface appearance variations across different viewpoints. In this paper, we propose RayNet, which combines the strengths of both frameworks. RayNet integrates a CNN that learns view-invariant feature representations with an MRF that explicitly encodes the physics of perspective projection and occlusion. We train RayNet end-to-end using empirical risk minimization. We thoroughly evaluate our approach on challenging real-world datasets and demonstrate its benefits over a piece-wise trained baseline, hand-crafted models as well as other learning-based approaches.

Existing learning based solutions to 3D surface prediction cannot be trained end-to-end as they operate on intermediate representations (eg, TSDF) from which 3D surface meshes must be extracted in a post-processing step (eg, via the marching cubes algorithm). In this paper, we investigate the problem of end-to-end 3D surface prediction. We first demonstrate that the marching cubes algorithm is not differentiable and propose an alternative differentiable formulation which we insert as a final layer into a 3D convolutional neural network. We further propose a set of loss functions which allow for training our model with sparse point supervision. Our experiments demonstrate that the model allows for predicting sub-voxel accurate 3D shapes of arbitrary topology. Additionally, it learns to complete shapes and to separate an object's inside from its outside even in the presence of sparse and incomplete ground truth. We investigate the benefits of our approach on the task of inferring shapes from 3D point clouds. Our model is flexible and can be combined with a variety of shape encoder and shape inference techniques.

Robust visual localization under a wide range of viewing conditions is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Handling the difficult cases of this problem is not only very challenging but also of high practical relevance, eg, in the context of life-long localization for augmented reality or autonomous robots. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on a joint 3D geometric and semantic understanding of the world, enabling it to succeed under conditions where previous approaches failed. Our method leverages a novel generative model for descriptor learning, trained on semantic scene completion as an auxiliary task. The resulting 3D descriptors are robust to missing observations by encoding high-level 3D geometric and semantic information. Experiments on several challenging large-scale localization datasets demonstrate reliable localization under extreme viewpoint, illumination, and geometry changes.

The success of deep learning in computer vision is based on the availability of large annotated datasets. To lower the need for hand labeled images, virtually rendered 3D worlds have recently gained popularity. Unfortunately, creating realistic 3D content is challenging on its own and requires significant human effort. In this work, we propose an alternative paradigm which combines real and synthetic data for learning semantic instance segmentation and object detection models. Exploiting the fact that not all aspects of the scene are equally important for this task, we propose to augment real-world imagery with virtual objects of the target category. Capturing real-world images at large scale is easy and cheap, and directly provides real background appearances without the need for creating complex 3D models of the environment. We present an efficient procedure to augment these images with virtual objects. In contrast to modeling complete 3D environments, our data augmentation approach requires only a few user interactions in combination with 3D models of the target object category. Leveraging our approach, we introduce a novel dataset of augmented urban driving scenes with 360 degree images that are used as environment maps to create realistic lighting and reflections on rendered objects. We analyze the significance of realistic object placement by comparing manual placement by humans to automatic methods based on semantic scene analysis. This allows us to create composite images which exhibit both realistic background appearance as well as a large number of complex object arrangements. Through an extensive set of experiments, we conclude the right set of parameters to produce augmented data which can maximally enhance the performance of instance segmentation models. Further, we demonstrate the utility of the proposed approach on training standard deep models for semantic instance segmentation and object detection of cars in outdoor driving scenarios. We test the models trained on our augmented data on the KITTI 2015 dataset, which we have annotated with pixel-accurate ground truth, and on the Cityscapes dataset. Our experiments demonstrate that the models trained on augmented imagery generalize better than those trained on fully synthetic data or models trained on limited amounts of annotated real data.

Recent work has shown local convergence of GAN training for absolutely continuous data and generator distributions. In this paper, we show that the requirement of absolute continuity is necessary: we describe a simple yet prototypical counterexample showing that in the more realistic case of distributions that are not absolutely continuous, unregularized GAN training is not always convergent. Furthermore, we discuss regularization strategies that were recently proposed to stabilize GAN training. Our analysis shows that GAN training with instance noise or zero-centered gradient penalties converges. On the other hand, we show that Wasserstein-GANs and WGAN-GP with a finite number of discriminator updates per generator update do not always converge to the equilibrium point. We discuss these results, leading us to a new explanation for the stability problems of GAN training. Based on our analysis, we extend our convergence results to more general GANs and prove local convergence for simplified gradient penalties even if the generator and data distributions lie on lower dimensional manifolds. We find these penalties to work well in practice and use them to learn high-resolution generative image models for a variety of datasets with little hyperparameter tuning.

3D shape completion from partial point clouds is a fundamental problem in computer vision and computer graphics. Recent approaches can be characterized as either data-driven or learning-based. Data-driven approaches rely on a shape model whose parameters are optimized to fit the observations. Learning-based approaches, in contrast, avoid the expensive optimization step and instead directly predict the complete shape from the incomplete observations using deep neural networks. However, full supervision is required which is often not available in practice. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised learning-based approach to 3D shape completion which neither requires slow optimization nor direct supervision. While we also learn a shape prior on synthetic data, we amortize, ie, learn, maximum likelihood fitting using deep neural networks resulting in efficient shape completion without sacrificing accuracy. Tackling 3D shape completion of cars on ShapeNet and KITTI, we demonstrate that the proposed amortized maximum likelihood approach is able to compete with a fully supervised baseline and a state-of-the-art data-driven approach while being significantly faster. On ModelNet, we additionally show that the approach is able to generalize to other object categories as well.

We address the problem of 3D shape completion from sparse and noisy point clouds, a fundamental problem in computer vision and robotics. Recent approaches are either data-driven or learning-based: Data-driven approaches rely on a shape model whose parameters are optimized to fit the observations; Learning-based approaches, in contrast, avoid the expensive optimization step by learning to directly predict complete shapes from incomplete observations in a fully-supervised setting. However, full supervision is often not available in practice. In this work, we propose a weakly-supervised learning-based approach to 3D shape completion which neither requires slow optimization nor direct supervision. While we also learn a shape prior on synthetic data, we amortize, i.e., learn, maximum likelihood fitting using deep neural networks resulting in efficient shape completion without sacrificing accuracy. On synthetic benchmarks based on ShapeNet and ModelNet as well as on real robotics data from KITTI and Kinect, we demonstrate that the proposed amortized maximum likelihood approach is able to compete with a fully supervised baseline and outperforms the data-driven approach of Engelmann et al., while requiring less supervision and being significantly faster.

In International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, International Conference on Computer Vision Theory and Applications, 2018 (inproceedings)

Abstract

Deep convolutional neural networks are the current state-of-the-art solution to many computer vision tasks. However, their ability to handle large global and local image transformations is limited. Consequently, extensive data augmentation is often utilized to incorporate prior knowledge about desired invariances to geometric transformations such as rotations or scale changes. In this work, we combine data augmentation with an unsupervised loss which enforces similarity between the predictions of augmented copies of an input sample. Our loss acts as an effective regularizer which facilitates the learning of transformation invariant representations. We investigate the effectiveness of the proposed similarity loss on rotated MNIST and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) in the context of different classification models including ladder networks. Our experiments demonstrate improvements with respect to the standard data augmentation approach for supervised and semi-supervised learning tasks, in particular in the presence of little annotated data. In addition, we analyze the performance of the proposed approach with respect to its hyperparameters, including the strength of the regularization as well as the layer where representation similarity is enforced.

This work investigates the estimation of dense three-dimensional motion fields, commonly
referred to as scene flow. While great progress has been made in recent years,
large displacements and adverse imaging conditions as observed in natural outdoor
environments are still very challenging for current approaches to reconstruction and
motion estimation. In this paper, we propose a unified random field model which reasons
jointly about 3D scene flow as well as the location, shape and motion of vehicles
in the observed scene. We formulate the problem as the task of decomposing the scene
into a small number of rigidly moving objects sharing the same motion parameters.
Thus, our formulation effectively introduces long-range spatial dependencies which
commonly employed local rigidity priors are lacking. Our inference algorithm then
estimates the association of image segments and object hypotheses together with their
three-dimensional shape and motion. We demonstrate the potential of the proposed
approach by introducing a novel challenging scene flow benchmark which allows for a
thorough comparison of the proposed scene flow approach with respect to various baseline
models. In contrast to previous benchmarks, our evaluation is the first to provide
stereo and optical flow ground truth for dynamic real-world urban scenes at large scale.
Our experiments reveal that rigid motion segmentation can be utilized as an effective
regularizer for the scene flow problem, improving upon existing two-frame scene flow
methods. At the same time, our method yields plausible object segmentations without requiring an explicitly trained recognition model for a specific object class.

2013

In International Conference on Computer Vision, pages: 3056-3063, Sydney, Australia, December 2013 (inproceedings)

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in understanding the semantics of
outdoor scenes in the context of autonomous driving. Towards this
goal, we propose a generative model of 3D urban scenes which is able
to reason not only about the geometry and objects present in the
scene, but also about the high-level semantics in the form of traffic
patterns. We found that a small number of patterns is sufficient
to model the vast majority of traffic scenes and show how these patterns
can be learned. As evidenced by our experiments, this high-level
reasoning significantly improves the overall scene estimation as
well as the vehicle-to-lane association when compared to state-of-the-art
approaches. All data and code will be made available upon publication.

We present a novel dataset captured from a VW station wagon for use in mobile robotics and autonomous driving research. In total, we recorded 6 hours of traffic scenarios at 10-100 Hz using a variety of sensor modalities such as high-resolution color and grayscale stereo cameras, a Velodyne 3D laser scanner and a high-precision GPS/IMU inertial navigation system. The scenarios are diverse, capturing real-world traffic situations and range from freeways over rural
areas to inner-city scenes with many static and dynamic objects. Our data is calibrated, synchronized and timestamped, and we provide the rectified and raw image sequences. Our dataset also contains object labels in the form of 3D tracklets and we provide online benchmarks for stereo, optical flow, object detection and other tasks. This paper describes our recording platform, the data format and the utilities that we provide.

In this paper we propose an affordable solution to self-
localization, which utilizes visual odometry and road maps
as the only inputs. To this end, we present a probabilis-
tic model as well as an efficient approximate inference al-
gorithm, which is able to utilize distributed computation
to meet the real-time requirements of autonomous systems.
Because of the probabilistic nature of the model we are
able to cope with uncertainty due to noisy visual odometry
and inherent ambiguities in the map (
e.g
., in a Manhattan
world). By exploiting freely available, community devel-
oped maps and visual odometry measurements, we are able
to localize a vehicle up to 3m after only a few seconds of
driving on maps which contain more than 2,150km of driv-
able roads.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems